What is the Service Design Programme?

The Service Design Programme is focused on people-centric professional services delivery improvements. This means using the user experience to guide improvement and provide a seamless user experience. 

We are using the principles of people-centric design thinking to improve our student, staff and research experience, aligned to the Great Support ambition of Imperial’s Enabling Roadmap providing great services to our staff and students. 

What is people-centric design thinking?

People-centric design thinking is about identifying opportunities to improve a users and service providers experience. The approach takes a user-centric perspective of their interactions with a service from the start to the end of their journey, along with the supporting organisational capabilities and processes to:

• gain a complete high-level, end-to-end, view of services from a user and service provider perspective
• identify the vital parts of, and opportunities to improve the user experience
• understand how the service is best provided (e.g. self-service, in-person) from a user perspective, where the work is best carried out (e.g. remotely or on site) and by whom (service providers).

How are we developing lifecycle user journey maps?

Imperial is applying service design thinking to the development of three core lifecycles; Student, Colleague (staff) and Research.

The Imperial Student Lifecyle was developed in 2022 and provides a high-level, end-to-end, student-centric view of service interactions. Owned by the Student Lifecycle Administration Board (SLAB), this map is being used to identify opportunities for improving the student experience. 

We are now piloting a similar approach for the Imperial Colleague Lifecycle and Imperial Research lifecycle to form a complete high-level, end-to-end view of our services and identify opportunities to improve the user experience. 

The journey maps developed will build upon information collated so far, including through the Great Service Programme, UniForum Service Experience Survey and Staff Survey, to detail the identified challenges and opportunities. These will be validated by service leads, subject matter experts and users in workshops over the summer 2024 period.

The final Lifecycle journey maps will be available on this webpage as a shared resource and reference, to help inform local and project service-related improvement initiatives when ready.